Auburn Aesthetics Forum micro-conference March 1st and 2nd

Event Information

Thursday, March 1, 2018
4:00 PM Mell
| 2250

Auburn Aesthetics Forum micro-conference:

March 1: C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley) and Matthew Strohl (Montana) in Mell 2250 at 4:00. "Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups" - We chart a middle path between overly restrictive and overly permissive normative views concerning cultural appropriation. The most restrictive normative position holds that, except under special conditions, we ought to defer to appropriation claims. We argue that this position threatens to undermine the capacity of groups to self-determine the dissemination of their own practices. We suggest that the normative importance of appropriation claims is best understood as deriving from group intimacy. We offer an account of group intimacy that expands on Julie Inness’s work on interpersonal intimacy. We propose that certain cultural practices are intimate practices for a group, and cultural appropriation can breach group intimacy. However, the intimacy account militates against blanket presumptions for or against cultural appropriation and supports instead attending to the wishes of each particular group. We conclude by raising a difficulty: many intimate groups are sub-agential and do not have clear procedure expressing their wishes.

March 2: Matthew Strohl (Montana) in Ross 136 at 3:00. "Games and the Art of Agency" - Some games constitute a distinctive art form, whose medium is agency. Those games offer us the opportunity to temporarily manipulate basic features of our practical agency, taking on temporary ends and temporary abilities. This allows for a distinctive aesthetic form, in which designers create agencies and environments for the sake of aesthetic experiences of the player’s practical reasoning and practical action. The fact that we can play such games illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily, for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. But though such temporary ends are adopted instrumentally, we cannot treat them as such during game-play. In order to sustain the absorbed and committed experiences characteristic of game-play, we must entertain these temporary in-game ends as final. Playing games requires that we adopt temporary sub-agencies. Thus, game-playing demonstrates a significant fluidity of human agency.